Avahi – service discovery for Linux

Avahi is a zero-configuration networking system for discovering and publishing services and hosts on a local network.

It implements DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) over Multicast DNS (mDNS), the same protocol family used by Apple Bonjour. Compatible devices and applications can therefore find one another without a centrally managed DNS server. The suite includes a system daemon, client libraries, command-line utilities, a GTK service browser, compatibility layers and IPv4 link-local configuration. Applications can use its D-Bus service or embed the lower-level avahi-core implementation. Avahi primarily targets Linux, with support for BSD systems and illumos.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Discovers printers, file shares, media services and other DNS-SD-advertised resources as they appear on the local network.
• Publishes host names, arbitrary records and services through mDNS, with probing and collision handling.
• Includes avahi-browse, avahi-resolve, avahi-publish and avahi-set-host-name command-line tools.
• Offers client and embedded core C APIs, together with D-Bus and GObject interfaces.
• Integrates with simple, threaded, GLib, Qt 5 and libevent main loops.
• Supplies a GTK-based service discovery dialog for graphical applications and standalone browsing.
• Provides compatibility interfaces for applications written for Bonjour’s libdns_sd API and HOWL.
• Supports IPv4, IPv6, multicast lookups, wide-area DNS and local-only services.
• Can reflect mDNS traffic between network interfaces, with filters controlling which queries are forwarded.
• Reads static XML service definitions, including textual and binary TXT record values.
• Includes avahi-autoipd for automatic IPv4 link-local address allocation when DHCP is unavailable.

Website: github.com/avahi/avahi
Support:
Developer: Avahi developers
License: GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 or later

Avahi is written primarily in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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